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The Why of Ferrets

10,000 Birds

Sorry for banging on about black-footed ferrets, but here’s a bit on why this trip was so special to me: Forty years ago the black-footed ferret was a bit more like the Loch Ness Monster than it is today. The species was extinct, a vanished part of the vanishing prairie — and not for the first time.

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Is The Hooded Grebe About To Go Extinct?

10,000 Birds

Twenty two species are distributed among six genera, depending on what happens to be extinct, and for the most part one grebe is like another. This makes Grebes vulnerable to climate change and the predation of invasive species. It is easy to see how Minks set lose in a welcoming habitat could eat an entire species.

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Are there so many birds that cats don’t matter?

10,000 Birds

In short, the answer is that in the United States there are 20 billion birds at the end of the breeding and fledging season, which gets winnowed down to 10 billion by the following early spring. Other felids are all much larger, the similar sized carnivores are things like minks and ferrets, and they have very different habits.

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Hey, What About the Great Auk?

10,000 Birds

Then a little later there was a spot of bother with DDT, but we pulled out of that one ok, with a toolbox that would surely stand us in good stead if we only had the will to use it – legislation and literature, captive breeding programs, nest platforms. A species, wiped off the earth, never to exist again. We could do it!

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The Falcon Thief: A Book Review

10,000 Birds

The simple answer is monetary gain, there is a global black market for these items, regardless of the species’ vulnerability for extinction. The work Hammer put into researching and attempting to ferret out the truth about Jeffrey Lendrum’s escapades is very impressive. As a birder, I couldn’t share these feelings.

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When conservation and animal rights collide

10,000 Birds

Wildlife conservation is concerned with protecting wildlife at the level of species or perhaps population. With the exception of species that number in the hundreds, conservation biologists are not as concerned with the fates of individual animals, it is only when such fates of many individuals are added up do they begin to worry.